Liberals love “virtue signaling,” the self-righteous act of letting everyone around them know they think they’re better than they are. When an old neighbor of mine found out what I did for a living, one of those “Hate Has No Home Here” signs suddenly popped up on their front lawn, for example. We never really spoke again, which was fine with me, so I didn’t find out what “hate” they thought had homes on the rest of the street. But I can imagine in their minds it was whatever kind of “hate” that was fashionable to be against at any given moment.

That is the mentality that leads Democrats to insist, loudly and often, that “it’s time the nation has a serious conversation” about whatever they’re claiming is the most important thing at that time.

Weirdly, they never actually have that conversation, on any topic. At least not with anyone who has a different perspective from them. MSNBC and CNN panels are constantly going off on race, gender, economics, everything, but they tend to result in a hallelujah chorus, with each person agreeing with the other, but taking it up a notch. “So and so is racist,” is followed by agreement and declaring someone or something else to be racist as well, and on it goes.

These are never serious discussions, nor are they debates. They’re the weaponization of emotional issues designed to manipulate people, usually to vote.

But there are some serious topics we should discuss, so let’s have at one, their favorite – racism.

The left has effectively weaponized that word for a couple of generations now. It’s worked for them. Racism is a horrible thing; no one wants to be called a racist. Not wanting to be called a racist hasn’t stopped Democrats from calling nearly everyone in the country one, at some point in the last few years.

If you opposed Barack Obama on anything, you were called a racist. There was no discussion of why you opposed him, or the issues on which you opposed him, they simply ascribed a motive to you and moved on.

The problem with calling everyone and everything racist is real racism, which still exists, gets ignored. When real racism is called out, that call is lost in the noise of the choir. People who need attention don’t get it because the people who want attention have sucked all the oxygen out of the room. In other words, liberals are hurting the people they claim to want to help.

Of course, they don’t really want to help anyone but themselves. Concern, as much as it exists, is for themselves and no one else.

But if we’re really going to have a serious conversation about race we should start with how little racism still exists. If we’re being honest, that is.

Democrats and the media preach that racism is everywhere, that our entire system of “built on racism,” that our country is “fundamentally racist.” This is a lie.

Racism certainly was prevalent in our country’s past, but we’ve mostly moved beyond it. So much so that the left has had to redefine what it is in order to maintain their weapon’s effectiveness. They created “microaggressions” and “bias incidences” to keep people afraid. And make no mistake, keeping people afraid is the goal.

How far have we come? As I write in my book, in 1920 there were 4 million members of the KKK, the granddaddy of all racist organizations. That was at a time when there were only 106 million people living in the country, almost 4 percent. Now, with a population approaching 330 million, the liberal’s own Southern Poverty Law Center estimates there are only between 5000 and 8000 of those pigs left. In 2016 the WNBA celebrated record attendance, averaging 7655 people per game. That means, if you take the average in the estimated range of klan members, 6500, there were more than a thousand people at any given game of the nation’s least popular professional sport than members of the KKK in the country.

That is amazing progress for any nation in 100 years, and should be a point of pride. Instead, it’s ignored and lied about. Every negative interaction between people of different races that can be pained as about race, is. Facts have no place in the discussion, it’s a straight emotional appeal. Emotion overrides logic.

It is long past time we had serious discussions in this country about a great many topics – race, gender, Social Security, and health care are but a few. And while the Democrats’ ability to manipulate so many people necessitates we take them seriously, it’s impossible to have a serious discussion with people who aren’t serious.